Beyond the connection: How Colleen Mac Namara is multiplying opportunity through ZelTec Telecoms

For the Innovator Trust, supporting a technology entrepreneur like Mac Namara is about more than strengthening one business. The greater opportunity lies in what happens next: when stronger businesses create jobs, knowledge is passed on, and access to technology begins opening doors far beyond the entrepreneur herself.

Mac Namara’s journey with ZelTec Telecoms brings that multiplier effect to life.

When she entered South Africa’s telecommunications sector, Mac Namara encountered the familiar doubts directed at women entering a largely male technical industry. Some questioned whether women would succeed in the field.

She chose to answer through the business she built. Founded in 2019, Zeltech Telecoms is a 100% Black woman-owned telecommunications company providing fibre-to-the-home and fibre-to-the-business installations and maintenance. The company also offers fibre and LTE packages as well as Voice over Internet Protocol solutions to households and businesses.

“We proved them wrong,” Mac Namara says, reflecting on the scepticism she encountered early in her career.

Today, fibre installations are the company’s strongest growth area, supported by technical expertise, network infrastructure and specialist equipment used to identify faults and signal loss across fibre networks. Yet Zeltech’s impact is perhaps clearest beyond the technology itself.

Over the past three years, the company has increasingly worked in townships and other underserved communities where affordable connectivity can change how people learn, work and build businesses. Areas once largely overlooked during the early expansion of fibre are becoming part of a much wider connected economy.

For Mac Namara, that matters. “There are kids that need connectivity for school, to do homework and research. SMMEs are working from home. Many businesses rely on connectivity,” she says. The divide remains particularly visible in rural communities. During a recent visit to a farm in KwaZulu-Natal, Mac Namara experienced an area where residents had only brief periods of reliable connectivity during the day.

About Innovator Trust

The Innovator Trust was created to support the growth of small black-owned Information and Communications Technology (ICT) businesses in South Africa. Through our programmes, we support and nurture the growth of SMMEs by facilitating training that develops the skills as business owners, and providing necessary resources and mentorship, ensuring small businesses become sustainable businesses contributing meaningfully to the ICT sector and the country’s economy.

To find out more about programmes on offer from the Innovator Trust, visit www.innovatortrust.co.za or get in touch via email at az.oc.tsurtrotavonni@ofni.

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